With the release of Windows Phone 8.1 the Visual Studio team has added advanced graphics debugging tools from Windows and Windows Store apps to Windows Phone 8.1. You can now inspect how each pixel your Direct3D scene has been created. This new tool is perfect for debugging complex shader bugs and strange performance issues in your app. In this session we will walk you through using these new graphics debugging tools. We will take you step by step and show you how to use the tools to debug issues with your shader. We will also show you techniques that you can use with these tools to track down and eliminate performance problems in your app.

Universal Apps and Windows Azure Mobile Services are a perfect combination to create apps that connect to the same cloud data quickly and easily while sharing common code. In this session will cover the basics of creating a Mobile Service locally using a .NET backend and debugging techniques. We then will connect our Phone and Tablet to the Mobile Service and use shared code in Windows 8.1 Universal Apps utilizing MVVM techniques.

In this session we will show how to best utilize the Windows Phone API's to minimize battery drain while utilizing the maximum benefits of having multiple cores on your Phone. We will use a sample application, along with the new Performance and Diagnostic tools, to illustrate the difference in battery consumption for a synchronous operation versus utilizing multiple CPU’s in an asynchronous operation.